Revisiting Our Talk with Composer Ian Cusson
A Conversation on Métis History, Identity, and the Power of Opera
Following our celebrations of National Indigenous Peoples Day and Canada Day, we want to reshare our conversation with Ian Cusson. Ian is a composer of art song, opera and orchestral work. Of Métis (Georgian Bay Métis Community) and French Canadian descent, his work explores Canadian Indigenous experience including the history of the Métis people, the hybridity of mixed-racial identity, and the intersection of Western and Indigenous cultures.
In a wide ranging conversation, Ian talks about the ways his Metis and French Canadian descent intersect with his music, the meanings of story, and the power of music to bring about societal change. We also play an excerpt from his opera, Fantasma and a selection from his Where there's a Wall song cycle.
This episode was originally published on June 20, 2022.
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Ashley Daniel Foot:
Today, we are honouring National Indigenous Peoples Day with a conversation with Canadian composer, Ian Cusson.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Ian while he was in residence at the Banff Centre where he is co-artistic director of Opera in the 21st Century. Ian's talked often about fiddling around at the piano as a young boy, and I asked him how on earth he went from that to where he is now.
Ian Cusson:
I started out as a kid with a family that was not immediately musical. Meaning, my parents were not musicians. However, especially on my dad's side, I come from a very musical family, so aunts and uncles and extended family members who played music but also told stories. So story was a really, really big part of my upbringing, hearing stories. I often tell the story when I was in the second and third grade, I can't count the number of days that I played hooky from school, feigning illness so that my grandmother could pick me up to bring me to her house and she would feed me food and she would tell me stories and it was far better than school. And so I was constantly ill and it was great.
But the formal time of my training, it was like a lot of kids, around six or seven and I was put into music lessons and that just snowballed into all of the great theory lessons and history lessons and really learning the craft of music. But the cool part was that I had some exceptional teachers who fed me a lot of music beyond just the traditional Western canon. So I was hearing everything from folk music, folk music of particular countries, and really experimental/contemporary classical music, to rhythm and blues and jazz and just I had a smorgasbord of music options.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Were there any artists that you were listening to or that you were introduced to at the time that kind of you've held onto?
Ian Cusson:
I was a huge fan of Jessye Norman.
A lifelong fan. And I never got to meet her, and I am so sad about that. And yet I treasure her through the interviews that she gave, just such an eloquent speaker, but then through this incredible voice. And I think what I loved about Jessye Norman as a kid was that it was a voice that could do a lot of things. It didn't seem classifiable and she spoke at length about not wanting to be pigeonholed and really not fitting in the sort of prescribed categories. That struck me quite early on as something very special. But her Four Last Songs, her Salome and the plethora of recordings she left were really an enormous part of my opera and music education.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I want to know, when you kind of transitioned from that fiddling around to realizing that “Aha! This is something that's going to be who I am as a vocation,” or if you even think that right now. I'd love to hear where that transition occurred. What do you think contributed to it?
Ian Cusson:
My path has not really been a linear path, and I realized the more musicians and artists I talked to, there really doesn't seem to be a linear path through the music or performing arts vocations. And mine certainly follows that non-traditional path. I dabbled, I played with sound as a kid, but as I discovered these incredible singers and composers and works, it really opened my imagination to, I could do that as well. I could tell stories through music, and I took that and ran with that in my teen years and wrote quite a bit of music.
But then I also took a path away from music for a number of years, although music was a part of the work that I did, even the professional work that I did. But really, I came back in earnest in my early thirties to composing. And really pursued it with the vocational intent of really doing this work as a primary source of living in addition to just enjoyment and expression. But the funny thing is you mentioned that I started out by playing in music. I've never stopped playing. And even yesterday I was sitting here in my studio in Banff and I was working on a piece and I was still playing with sound. I really don't think that I'll ever leave that frame of creation because it really has informed the way I make work and it really has worked for me.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
When you say playing with sound, what inspires you and in any given moment, what draws you in? I'd love to hear if you could walk us through a moment in which you're inspired and then decide to take that step.
Ian Cusson:
Because I write so much vocal music and operatic music, it's almost always text. To me, text is primary, and a lot of people say, "Well, is the music more important, say in opera, or is text more important?" To me, of course, they're completely married and they are completely united, and they should be woven together in such a way that they're inseparable. But at least from the creation side of things, I always start with text and it shapes everything from the sound world. Let's say the story is taking place under the water, that will inform the kind of approach to creating a sound world for that space or that moment.
But right down to the line and even the word choice, that helps the inflection of the shape of a vocal line, for example. It helps establish the length of a line or the pacing of a scene. So really for me, working with text is really the bedrock, the framework for a musical work. And so really important to me is relationships that I have with my librettists and the poets that I set. To me, they are really writing the music for me, and I'm just sort of joining along that journey of creation with them.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I'm thinking of one of your pieces, Where There's a Wall, you use a poem by Joy Kogawa. I wondered about the feelings of that particular creation, and I wonder if we can maybe play a little of that piece. The poem says, "Where there's a wall, there are words to whisper by loose bricks, wailing prayers to utter, birds to carry messages taped to their feet." I really encourage listeners to go and read the work. It's fantastic.
That's Krisztina Szabó and Rachael Kerr performing Where There's a Wall by Ian Cusson.
I'd love to know about the creation of that piece, and I think there's a message in there of hope, and I think I wonder is that part of your core belief as an artist, and is that what you want to communicate because of the text or through your work as well?
Ian Cusson:
The Joy Kogawa poem that you're referencing, Where There's a Wall, and the rest of that cycle of songs that were based on poems of hers really hit me at a time… I came to those poems in about 2016. I'd known her work for years and wanted to set some of her texts. But 2016, I was watching the television and the rhetoric, especially south of the border, was very much about fear. Fearmongering, the fear of outsiders, the discussion of wall building as a means of keeping in and keeping out, keeping safe, keeping pure, keeping clean. All of this language was bandied about in the media and through conversations that I was having with people. And these poems talk to all of those things, of course, written in a very different time and a different context, but had complete application to this work.
And I think there is both the message of hope, and certainly that is very important to me, but there's also this sort of rebellious contrarian spirit that a lot of people are surprised, I hold very dear too. When you meet me, it may not be on the fore of my personality, but it is really deeply rooted in me. And when someone talks about keeping a person out by a wall, my first thought is how do I transgress the wall?
And this poem just is a litany of ways to get around the wall and it opens, "Where there's a wall, there's a way around, over, through, under. There are words that we can whisper," like you said, "through a loose brick, wailing prayers to utter, birds to carry messages taped to their feet. There are poems to be written." Any wall that is constructed, either to keep us out or to keep us in can be torn down, can be scaled, and even language and art can break that wall down. And so I think this act of creating musical work around a poetic work is an act of rebellion and deconstructing of a wall.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I love that. I mean, of course, I think of the Brechtian quote (from To Those Born Later), "In the dark times, what do we do? We sing about the dark times." And you've talked about this idea of a wall, and I think our art form is notorious for having walls built around it. It's one that for a newbie audience can seem entirely impenetrable and can seem extremely elite.
I think you've done a lot of incredible work to try to smash that wall. I'm thinking about your most recent premier, Fantasma, and I want to talk about that in a moment, but I want to talk more about the idea of crashing through a wall in our art form. And I think there are so many ways that you do that just because of who you are.
So I want you to talk about how you feel that influences you and where you came from and what it all kind of contributes. It's a long question, I know, but I think it speaks a lot to the nature of what you do, and that's why I brought up that beautiful song cycle.
Ian Cusson:
The art form itself, it often does feel impenetrable, and I think part of it is because it carries with it… at least contemporarily in the last say, 100 years. And that's contemporary, if you believe it or not, in this art form. This idea of privilege and access and wealth. And don't get me wrong, I love having a night out at the theatre and getting dressed up and there can be a real... There's almost a ceremony around that. And again, it's this idea of you're entering this hallowed space with 1,000 or 4,000 people and you're experiencing this work. There's something almost ceremonial about that. And so the idea of putting on garb and preparing yourself to have this encounter and this collective experience is what is so beautiful.
But unfortunately with that can get attached things that really are exclusionary of many people, especially people who don't have the funding to be able to buy tickets or feel comfortable even in a space where people are rubbing shoulders and having chitchats about the art form.
In some ways, it feels like the opera that has been such an important part of history is exclusionary. And for me it's about, again, it's a wall in front of me and I just want to break it down. My colleagues and I will have this conversation a lot about how we can transgress those barriers that are put up and that have existed for a long time. We all take a different path through how to do that. And for me, one of the ways is telling stories that have not been told in the theatre. Telling the stories differently.
The sound world that I write and create musically will always be a point of, I think, access for people. It doesn't feel hyper-intelligent or hyper-sophisticated for sophistication purposes. It hopefully will feel accessible or reachable or grabbable. And there will be challenging moments, but you will be able to follow a story and enter into the world of the characters and the tensions that they have and the decisions that they have to make.
My real hope is that you'll have an emotional engagement as you experience my operas. That emotional connection may be with a person who looks different from you or who has a different walk of life. And that's the great thing about theatre and of course film and other performing arts where we can enter a different person's story and learn something new about ourselves, about the world we live in, expand the horizons of our thinking. And so for me, it's about bringing stories that have not existed in these "hallowed", and I'm putting air quotes around that, spaces of the opera house, bringing new stories with new voices and new bodies on the stage who haven't occupied those spaces as well.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
You've talked about coming from a storytelling tradition. What is that? Tell us about that exactly.
Ian Cusson:
Human beings, I realize, we're so wired to make sense of ourselves, of our world, of our environment. And one of the ways that we seem to universally do that is through telling stories, telling stories to our families, telling stories to our friends. I think that is the act that I feel has made a lot of sense in my life as a young person, but then now as I continue along in this profession and make a profession out of telling stories.
It's really about making sense of the world we live in. And sometimes it's making sense about the things that feel impenetrable or feel impossible or feel too big emotionally for me to handle alone, that there almost needs to be this collective exploration of sitting in a house together, in a theatre together and experiencing that story with other human beings and then discovering something new about myself.
And so that's really the hallmark of my making, of my composing, of the work that I do is making sense of my own existence in humanity and hopefully providing a space for other people to engage those questions for themselves and for their own community.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I want to talk a little bit about your Métis background and how it informs your work.
Ian Cusson:
I come from a community, the Georgian Bay Métis community, which is on the shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario. It's a really interesting piece of land because it's a piece of land that a lot of people have lived on over the millennia. But in the late 1820s, a group of people came from further west, we're a mixed community, so they were indigenous and often had an indigenous mother and a white father.
Often their families were involved in the fur trade, either with the North West Company, usually with the North West Company. And this group of families had built community together and had ties further west and had ties with other communities, but sort of collectivized. And of course, the piece of land that they lived on was seeded to the Americans, and so they had to ship off. And there's this great account of our families getting in canoes and traveling along the waterways and being given these plots of land along the Georgian Bay. And so Penetanguishene is one of the main communities that had a lot of our families landing in.
The experience of living in that community beside a lot of other French settlers who came and a strong Ojibwe population as well, was an experience of living in some ways between cultures, but also within a very rooted culture. I think of my body as a place of, it's a kind of intersection of identities. You've got a lot of various identities, but one of the two that kind of I think a lot about, and I think a lot about in my own work is being indigenous, but having a very strong settler contingent.
When a lot of people meet me, they wouldn't know that I have any indigenous ancestry because of the way I present visually. And yet this is a really important part of how I grew up and who I am and who my family is, and the stories that I know and the connection to the land that I've been given through my grandfather and through past generations.
And so I've felt, and often as a younger person, I felt like I lived between worlds. I wasn't either “white enough,” let's call it, or “indigenous enough.” And I sort of lived in a place of lacking. And as I've gotten older, as I've been able to articulate that more and think about that more.
I've really tried to change my own thinking about that intersectional way of living as being actually a place of real abundance, as a place of real… also creative potential because not only do I get to share in these incredible strands of history and culture, I am all of those things at once in one body. And how do they intersect? I don't really know at times. How do they show themselves in my music or in the work that I write? It's not always clear.
A funny thing I've been asked before, "What's the indigenous part of your music writing?" As though I could extricate that part of my... And early on when I would get asked that question, I would probe a little bit further with the person asking, and they'd usually end up saying, "Well, like so where are the drums or where is the 1-5-1 if you have a musical framework?" This was the idea of what indigenous sound was.
And I think what I've been trying to do, and certainly I'm not the only one, there's a really robust community of indigenous classical musicians in Canada who are pushing hard against these really old-fashioned and really out of date notions. And what's really cool is that the work of this community of artists that are working right across Turtle Island, we make work that sounds completely different one from the next.
Some of us have more like this kind of hyper post romantic inclination. Some of us have a really kind of intellectualized mid 20th century sound. Some of us have neoclassical sounds. Some of us incorporate the big drum in the work. Some of us have mixed kind of like acoustic with electroacoustic sounds.
We all sound completely different and we're all indigenous artists. And I think we as a collective, as a group of artists, kind of thumb our nose at what indigenous sound is. We're saying, "It is all these things." And it is even the stories that don't center an indigenous narrative. They're still indigenous because they come through our bodies and our lived experience and our humanity.
So it's messy. We can't really sort out the threads of who we are, but isn't that true of all people? How could we sort the parts of our identities out? We can't. We're just an amalgam of those things and it's a beautiful amalgam.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I love that. I love all of that, and I resonate deeply with that as a child of an African American grandmother and a French Canadian grandfather, it's certainly, you live in that intersection of tensions and it is that bounty I think that brings the voices to bear that we have within us. And I just appreciate so much that you do that.
I remember when I first met you, I looked down at your shoes and they were the most fabulous shoes I think I've ever seen. But that day you were working with a community of artists on a piece of work called Namwayut with Calgary Opera, you were in process with that.
What I was amazed by was just how every single person in that room, down to the person who was filming the day was part of that collective story. And I want to talk a little bit about the democratization that you bring, and I don't think it's just you, but I think that you have and that you had in that room, and how important it is, I think to just remove that hierarchy that we usually have when we're in an opera creation place.
Ian Cusson:
Yvette Nolan was a huge part of and is a huge part of that project as both librettist and director. And she wears many hats in that piece, as do we all. And I think her description is really apt, which is the idea of we take the triangle that is often the hierarchical shape. Someone is at the top and then there are many people underneath them, and we turn it on its side and we sort of expand out the edges of it to make it a circle, a sort of horizontal circle, if you will. And in a circle, there is no top, there's no bottom, there's just everyone in that space. And like you said, every person has equal voice, has equal importance. Every person has something to bring to whatever it is that that group is doing. In our case, it was writing an opera and it was really an act of, and that project that continues is an act of really asking ourselves, how do we make things?
Do we make things by having one single person create a story, write the words down, send that by fax or email or however, carrier pigeon, to a composer who then writes all the music and then sends that off to singers in a company who then produces it, which is the old way of doing it.
But we're really trying to say, here we have a room of people who have exceptional abilities and really just bring all kinds of human lived experience to the room. Could we not all shape the story? Could we not all contribute to the language and the words of the piece? Could we not all contribute to the sound world? And of course, in this room, it doesn't mean that every single person has equal time writing music or equal time writing text, but everyone has a voice and a say and a perspective, and those perspectives are heard and are listened to and are welcomed.
And you know what's amazing? It makes for such so much of a stronger piece. You mentioned that sometimes the person filming the day, filming the room who would otherwise or in another space just dissolve into the background, they actually have brought some of the most interesting ideas to this project and will have their thumbprint on the final version of this piece. It is really truly a collective creation.
Now, you might ask, okay, that sounds great. In a pipe dream, that's perfect, but in reality, how do you make decisions? How do you move things forward? The interesting thing is that it actually works itself out more easily than one might think. Yes, sometimes we make decisions, yes, sometimes one person will make a decision, but it's always offered in the spirit of an offer that is accepted and that can be discussed and we can move very quickly through decision making. You'd think we'd get bogged down, but it's incredible that sort of the yes and offers like, "Oh yes, great idea and how about this?" It really generates the spirit of openness and giving and creative flow that is exceptionally exciting.
I want more of those experiences and I want to bring that practice on that project to bear on all of the projects that I create. And sure in some of those projects I might be the sole composer, but how can we bring that attitude of openness, of generosity, of kindness, of everyone having a voice to the whole room in any space that I'm in?
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I love that you're talking about accountability. You're talking about collective responsibility. As part of the second-largest opera company in Canada, I feel that we have a lot to learn from the work that you do, not only on projects like Namwayut, but also with a Circle of Artists at the Canadian Opera Company. I'd love it if you could share a little bit about what that is and what that looks like at the Circle of Artists and what your role is.
Ian Cusson:
The Circle of Artists is really formed in and around a production in 2017, which was a remounting of the historic Canadian opera, Louis Riel. And at that time, a lot of great conversation was beginning.
Some of that was led by Dylan Robinson, a professor who is helping the company to sort of see and expand its view on some of the work itself and parts of the work that were problematic. And this led to the company really saying, "We need an advisory group, but a group of people who will come together and really that we can learn from and that we can share with." And so the group was formed and I joined it a couple of years later, and it's a dynamic group.
So just to give you a picture, we sit in a circle always, and there are indigenous artists that touch the operatic art form from various perspectives, sometimes from a stage management perspective, sometimes from a singing perspective, a creation perspective, all sort of gamuts of ways of connecting to opera. And we sit with the executives of the Canadian Opera Company and we all have equal floor time. We talk about a range of things in terms of priorities for the company, and we offer sort of a sounding board for the company on certain issues. And we're led of course and gathered by an elder who really has the first word in the room and has the final word in the room. And that is an important part of grounding our time.
It's funny, when you're with an elder in a room, it feels like your grandma is there and it brings me back to being a child. I've of course lost my grandparents now, but having an elder in the room, you sit and listen and they might talk for 20 minutes or 30 minutes of that two hour time we have together, and that's okay. And it's valuable and it's great. It's a real beautiful thing. But even just having the elders speak reminds us to pull away from the ways that we always go about structuring meetings, even within a large opera company.
And so we've been able to help guide the company through thinking about land acknowledgements, what those mean, how they can be done meaningfully and effectively, engagement with the indigenous communities in and around Toronto, and then also thinking creatively about programming and talking about the needing to prioritize main stage and second stage programming that is led and run and focused and centered around indigenous story and indigenous creation. It's been an amazing space, I think for the company. I think it's been a place for us to all realize that we have voices and we can shape this industry in ways that will lead it into a new century. A new, like I like to say, a new 400 years of creation, 400-year-old art form.
What are the next 400 years? Well, they are going to look different than the last 400, and it's going to be amazing. We are going to make exceptional art, and I hope we will draw new audiences who say, "What the heck is this art form? It's incredible!" I see myself reflected there, but I see other people reflected there that are informing me about who I am and giving me this emotional space to engage with art and beauty and tragedy and horror and all of the wonderful bits that go into opera.
And so I'm excited to see more and more companies follow that lead and say, "How can we be meaningfully engaging the communities around us and listening to those communities, sitting and listening?"
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I'm looking forward to the next 400 years also, of which I will be around for just a little bit of, but I want to talk about Fantasma and it looks amazing. Tell the audiences a little bit about what it is.
Ian Cusson:
Fantasma is an opera that was commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company in 2018 to be a piece that could be performed by their Ensemble Studio, which is the artist training program at the Canadian Opera Company. And so they commissioned this work and it came with a number of parameters, and parameters I think are one of the most fantastic things.
It was to be an opera for families or that families could enjoy and sit through and it had to be a 45-minute length and incorporate the voices and resources of the Ensemble Studio. The first thing I asked for was to collaborate with a good friend, Colleen Murphy, who is an exceptional playwright and an incredible librettist and just an all around amazing human being. And this led to several years of creation of this piece that got delayed, of course, because of pandemic setbacks.
It was presented in March of 2022, and the piece really centers around a carnival, which tells the story of these two girls who come to the carnival. They're 15 years old. One has a phone, carries a phone with her, and has, we get the sense, more access and privilege in terms of financial resource. The other comes with her mother and six-month-old baby brother. And in that time at the carnival, they sort of see the world of this place which is wacky and zany and interesting, and yet they enter a haunted manor in the carnival. And in the haunted manor they meet a boy and the boy is a dead boy. In our first production, he was shrouded in this white ghost cloak and they learn his story.
His story is that he was murdered when he was 10 years old in a school. And we get the sense that this happened probably 50 or more years ago. And he says to them, "I want to find my grave so that I can sleep." But we learn that his grave likely doesn't exist. In fact, he talks about a field where he was maybe the last place he remembers, and these young women say, "We are going to help you. We are going to help you find your grave so that you can sleep." And they make this beautiful promise to him and they exit this sort of inner sanctum of the haunted manor and they go back out into the wider world of the carnival where the adults are. They explain this young boy's story to them and not one adult believes them. And they try and try and push and try to convince the adults that they need to help this boy. They made a promise to him.
And we end with the family leaving and the carnival shutting down. In fact, it's leaving town tomorrow. And the final scene of the opera is this boy on stage now holding a suitcase with his best friend, which is a plastic skeleton named Lily. And he's waiting for them and he says, "Are you coming? Are you coming soon?" And we hold on that image and then we fade black. And the reality is the girls will never come back. They tried but cannot keep their promise and he will vanish with the carnival, which leaves in the morning.
To me, this may seem like a really strange story to tell for families and to have chosen, and yet it is a story, I think one of the really critical pieces that both Colleen and I had was to say, "Children have an incredible capacity to process a wide range of human emotions. We need to make an offer to them without telling them what they need to feel and believe and let them have an emotional experience and then to take what they will away from that and continue in their lives.” I think that's something that we were able to achieve.
It's certainly not an easy piece to watch, and yet it has lots of humor in it as well, but it leaves you sort of with a punch to the gut. I think that's something that opera can do so incredibly well, to leave people with this emotional offer that they can then take it and fold into their lives.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Ian Cusson, thank you so much for this gift of a conversation. I so appreciate all of the things you've talked about with regards to intersectionality and the obligation that we have to really tell stories in a more wide and curious and playful way.
And as we wrap our episode up today, here's some beautiful music from Ian Cusson's Fantasma, recorded at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Beautiful music from Ian Cusson's opera for young audiences, Fantasma. Watch the space for more details on when you can discover more about that exciting and intoxicating show and watch the space for more programming as we get into next season. Tickets are now on sale, subscriptions are on sale in VancouverOpera.ca.
Vancouver Opera is returning to Deer Lake Park with Opera in the Park, a free concert on July 14, 2024.
My name is Ashley Daniel Foot. You've been listening to Inside Vancouver Opera.
This episode was produced, hosted, and edited by Ashley Daniel Foot. This article was by Mack McGillivray.
Ian Cusson is a composer of art song, opera and orchestral work. Of Métis (Georgian Bay Métis Community) and French Canadian descent, his work explores Canadian Indigenous experience including the history of the Métis people, the hybridity of mixed-racial identity, and the intersection of Western and Indigenous cultures.
He studied composition with Jake Heggie (San Francisco) and Samuel Dolin, and piano with James Anagnoson at the Glenn Gould School. He is the recipient of the Chalmers Professional Development Grant, and grants through the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
Ian was an inaugural Carrefour Composer-in-Residence with the National Arts Centre Orchestra for 2017-2019 and was Composer-in-Residence for the Canadian Opera Company for 2019-2021. He was a Co-artistic Director of Opera in the 21st Century at the Banff Centre and the recipient of the 2021 Jan V. Matejcek Classical Music Award from SOCAN and the 2021 Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize. Ian is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and a member of the Canadian League of Composers.
Inside Vancouver Opera is hosted by Ashley Daniel Foot, Vancouver Opera’s Director of Engagement and Civic Practice. Boundlessly creative and fascinated by the way that art is created and presented, Ashley has guided arts organizations across Canada to craft messages and tell unique stories.
At Vancouver Opera, Ashley carefully develops all programming that takes place off the mainstage and looks for unique and unexpected ways to highlight the power of opera in the community. He also manages all education, community partnerships, and guides the company’s commitment to justice, equity, reconciliation, and diversity. He’s particularly proud of his recent collaborations with with the Vancouver Public Library, BC Alliance for Arts and Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Rumble Theatre. He is also the co-chair of the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee.